Happy Monday, folks! I’m sure by now you’ve heard the big news: Six Apart bought Pownce. The Pownce team will join 6A, and the Pownce service will shut down. It’s a shame they’re closing the site — it had some really nice features. Hopefully, we’ll see some of those social networking and microblogging features show up in a future version of Movable Type.

Happy Monday, folks! I don’t know about you, but I sure was glad to see the U.S. elections finally come to an end. Of course, considering the past election season lasted almost 2 years, it may have finished just in time for the mid-term election season to begin!

I bring this up in order to share a bit of MT Presidential trivia: Both current President Bush (in 2004) and President-Elect Obama (in 2008) used Movable Type for their campaign blogs. Perhaps that will give them something to chat about as they are preparing for the transition of power.

Alright, enough politics, let’s get down to business.

This week, Brad Choate posted a proposal for trimming white space in templates. I love this idea, and hope it gets implemented soon. When you’re writing complex templates, it’s easy to have long blocks where all you’re doing is setting the values of MT variables. When your page gets published, you end up with lots of empty space. As an occasional Ruby on Rails programmer, I like the proposed implementation — the syntax is similar to that used in ERB templates. [Read more…]

Hello, folks! I’m Billy Mabray, and I’ll be providing this week’s Movable Type update. I hope no one minds, but I went back a bit farther then a week — there’s been some really interesting things going on in the community that I wanted to share.

On with the show!

Plugins

Linked Entry Custom Fields: This is a deceptively named plugin from Six Apart. Yes, it does extend Custom Fields with a type of field that links entries together. But more than that, it will migrate your data from the popular Right Fields plugin to the Custom Fields that’s built into MT. This is huge, because although there have been various tutorials published on how to migrate, there’s never been an official, recommended way before now. [Read more…]

The new Citrus Theme features licenses for single, multi-site, and developer versions of the theme – and comes in multiple color schemes. There’s even a version specifically for personal blogs.

The prices for the new theme range from $79 – $149.

The launch of this new theme continues the trend for premium blog designs from strong designers at a reasonable price – just add some customization and you’re good to go with a great looking new blog design!

It’s been a while since I last posted a Movable Type Monday (and during that time, I’ve been in three different countries!) and there’s been a lot of Movable Type activity! Most importantly, Movable Type 4.2was released and introduced one of the largest licensing changes since the MT 3.0 debacle – the introduction of Movable Type Pro, what used to be two separate products (the professional pack and community solution) is now one, and is free for bloggers (which is another way of saying “unincorporated entities”).

Movable Type Pro lets you turn any site into a full social publishing platform, combining all of Movable Type’s abilities as a blogging and CMS with social networking features like profiles, ratings, user registration, forums, following, and more.

Another, less obvious, change was with the open source side – the name “Movable Type Open Source” seemed to generate a lot of confusion for new users and so, in an attempt to make things simpler, has been renamed to simply “Movable Type.”

Movable Type 4.2 was shortly followed by 4.21 after the community found and helped patch two important bugs that surfaced with 4.2. None-the-less, the response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive! [Read more…]